travel

I committed to being back by the end of July and I’m squeaking in just on the last day! 😛 First, I want to thank you all for the Birthday wishes! 😀 I had a great birthday! My SO and I baked a cake… a Betty Crocker boxed cake in the Cherry Chip flavour. It’s a nostalgic flavour for me as I remember having it at birthday parties when I was little! I don’t have great photos of the masterpiece but here’s what a slice looked like:
It turned out really well for our first ever baking attempt! 😀 (It’s not fancy like the ones I see online but it’s the taste that counts, right?) Aside from my birthday, during my time away from blogging, I’ve been doing some fun stuff…

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It’s been a while since I’ve done a Throwback Thursday and today’s is timely since it’s Spring / Easter themed. 🙂 As you may recall, I visited Japan in May-June of 2016. So nearly a year later, I’m finally posting about my experiences at Tokyo Disneyland! 😛
I showed a couple of photos from Tokyo Disney on the blog right after my trip, with a promise to write a more in-depth post later… and here’s later! 😉

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So what’s it like to go on a 7-day cruise? I’ll admit that I’m not keen on all-inclusive resorts, or packaged vacations because I feel trapped. I do not like being herded around like cattle for meal time and activities. I know a lot of people who have gone on cruises and thoroughly enjoyed themselves, so we decided to give it a try.
We went on the ship Vision of the Sea, which is part of the “Vision” class of ships from Royal Caribbean. We chose the cruise line based on a lot of discussions with friends and the top 3 recommended cruise lines were Celebrity Cruises, Norwegian and Royal Caribbean. Celebrity Cruises was our top choice but it did not have any remaining sail dates for 2016 to the destinations we wanted.
I had jokingly said that I would name this post “Cruise Life for Type A Personalities” – I wouldn’t call myself a true “Type A” personality, but I do have some traits. It takes me a while to relax whenever we go on vacation. On a 7-day vacation, it probably takes me 2 days to stop pacing the hotel room, and then another 2 days to stop waking up at 6am. 😛 So how did I find cruise life?

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Hey! I’m back from our cruise to the Mediterranean. 🙂 It was a fantastic trip! But I’ll start out with the not so good: our flight home from Venice was delayed by over 5 hours because of a careless remark by a fellow passenger. What was an otherwise seamless transport from sea to air was marred by what the captain of the flight called “an asinine comment”. Apparently during the check-in process, someone on our flight made a comment about airport security – we never found out who it was or what the person said or if the person was detained afterward. We were kept in the dark about the situation until after we reboarded the plane. We had all originally boarded the flight on time but the plane just sat on the tarmac for over an hour until we we told that due to a “technical issue”, we had to to take all of our stuff and deplane. Then we had to go through security screening again – we thought it was a mechanical issue with the plane so we all joked that we were going through screening again to provide us with “something to do” while they fixed the plane. They had one screening station for the entire flight! 😡 The Italian police and fire department were called and the cargo hold thoroughly checked. Our flight was scheduled to depart at 11:30am but we did not leave until close to 5pm. It wasn’t the worst thing by any means for us, we just got home later than we had anticipated. But for many fellow passengers who had connecting flights, they missed their flights and were put on the next available flight – some were rebooked for flights departing 2 days later! 😮 So, please please even if you think it’s a funny joke, don’t utter any comments about airport security while in the airport / airplane. They take this stuff seriously! 🙄 I said to the SO, “Imagine if this had happened when we were flying out to Venice and missed the cruise ship?” Ugh!

Here’s a picture to thank you for reading the above. 🙂 It’s a shot of our cruise ship from a hilltop restaurant in Santorini, Greece.

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I’m going on a Mediterranean cruise coming up this week and we’ll be gone for 10 days. 😀 I want to pack super light for this trip since it’ll be fairly casual, and since we’re going to warm places, I don’t anticipate wanting to wear too much makeup.

And I’ve just started the Project Pan so technically I’m supposed to be focused on using those products, so I’ve tried to incorporate a few items on this trip. I’ll be listing skincare here too.

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Here’s a bit of a throw back Thursday post. It’s been nearly 2 months since I returned from Japan! Here are some non-beauty bits I picked up from Japan.

I didn’t do much clothing shopping in Japan. There wasn’t a ton there that I couldn’t get here at home. Although, I was a big fan of their style: the standard outfit consisted of elastic waist a-line skirt and a loose boxy top, worn with platform wedge sandals or Birkenstocks. It was all about comfort! 🙂

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Exactly a week ago, I had the pleasure of attending an intimate Open House at the MUJI Canada HQ in Toronto. Imagine my excitement to get a behind-the-scenes look at where the busy bees make MUJI happen! And how timely, since I’d just visited MUJI in Japan, the mothership! 😀
The Open House was focused on introducing us to the MUJI to GO concept, which is all about travel essentials. Myself, along with 4 other Toronto bloggers and YouTubers, were given a hands-on demonstration of the MUJI to GO products.

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Today I’ll discuss some of my observations and experiences in shopping for makeup in Japan. Hopefully this will help someone out there who might be taking a trip to Japan.
First thing. There are SO. MANY. BRANDS.
It’s overwhelming! In an average Canadian drugstore, there may be about 8 key brands. In Japan, there’s at least double that amount. And some of them look so similar, it’s hard to distinguish between them (cue joke about how all Asians look alike 😛 ) I spent some visits in the beginning just surveying my options and noting down potential buys without buying anything – I didn’t want to buy things I’d regret. As far as I know, there are no returns on makeup in Japan.

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Personally, I didn’t think I went completely overboard with makeup shopping. For one thing, I was supremely worried about wandering around Tokyo at night by myself to go shopping. Why I had to go shopping in the evenings was because my days were filled with sightseeing! And then, by the evening, I was so tired from walking around all day, I didn’t spend too much time shopping. Also, I was shopping rather critically: lots of Japanese makeup is super sparkly and sheer. If it wasn’t something I’d truly use, I passed on it – so that left me with a more narrow band of items I’d spend my money on (not to mention, haul home). Here’s what I got:

CANMAKE
• Marshmallow Finish Powder in MO Matte Ochre and MB Matte Beige Ochre
• Cream Cheek in #05 Sweet Apricot and #14 Apple Cream Red (I swear I had another shade in my basket but it didn’t make it home with me!)
• Gokubuto mascara (volumizing)
• Gokunobi mascara (lengthening)
• Colourful Nails polish in #33 Pink Glitter
• Lasting Multi Eyebase WP (eye shadow primer)
I had some ideas of brands I’d want to look at when I was in Japan. I originally glossed over Canmake as being too girly for me. But it turns out their products are quite well reviewed and very reasonably priced! I ended up researching a lot on @cosme awards (which seems to be the Japanese makeup Bible) to find out which items to try and several of these were award winners. I do wish I’d gotten more cheek products – they have so many cute ones to choose from.

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Japan is such an interesting place to a foreigner like me. No matter what you hear about Japan in the media, it doesn’t prepare you for what the reality is. Here are some photos and observations I took note of during my trip.

Food

Sushi was very fresh. They do not offer any rolls with avocado (so no, there are no California rolls).

I had already been advised that sushi is not the mainstay food in Japan. In fact, I only ate sushi 3 times while I was there. The food we came across the most were:
• ramen
• donburi (beef rice bowls, think Yoshinoya)
• “curry” (which is like a brown gravy with a little bit of spice)
• tonkatsu (breaded pork cutlet)
• yakitori (chicken skewers)
• tempuraContinue reading →